Abstract
Cooperative relay technology has recently been introduced into cognitive radio (CR) networks to enhance the network capacity, scalability, and reliability of end-to-end communication. In this paper, we investigate an underlay cognitive network where the quality of service (QoS) of the secondary link is maintained by triggering an opportunistic regenerative relaying once it falls under an unacceptable level. Analysis is conducted for two schemes, referred to as the channel-state information (CSI)-based and fault-tolerant schemes, respectively, where different amounts of CSI were considered. We first provide the exact cumulative distribution function (cdf) of the received signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) over each hop with colocated relays. Then, the cdf's are used to determine a very accurate closed-form expression for the outage probability for a transmission rate R. In a high-SNR region, a floor of the secondary outage probability occurs, and we derive its corresponding expression. We validate our analysis by showing that the simulation results coincide with our analytical results in Rayleigh fading channels.